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Detainees drugged against their will
for deportation
Raw
Story
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
In day 4 of a Washington Post series, Careless Detention, it is
revealed that the United States has injected hundreds of foreigners
without their consent with dangerous mind-altering drugs for trips
returning them to their home countries, according to government documents,
medical records, and interviews with some of the actual people who
were drugged.
From the report:
The government's forced use of antipsychotic drugs,
in people who have no history of mental illness, includes dozens of
cases in which the "pre-flight cocktail," as a document
calls it, had such a potent effect that federal guards needed a wheelchair
to move the slumped deportee onto an airplane. "Unsteady gait.
Fell onto tarmac," says a medical note on the deportation of
a 38-year-old woman to Costa Rica in late spring 2005. Another detainee
was "dragged down the aisle in handcuffs, semi-comatose,"
according to an airline crew member's written account. Repeatedly,
documents describe immigration guards "taking down" a reluctant
deportee to be tranquilized before heading to an airport. In a Chicago
holding cell early one evening in February 2006, five guards piled
on top of a 49-year-old man who was angry he was going back to Ecuador,
according to a nurse's account in his deportation file. As they pinned
him down so the nurse could punch a needle through his coveralls into
his right buttock, one officer stood over him menacingly and taunted,
"Nighty-night." Such episodes are among more than 250 cases
The Washington Post has identified in which the government has, without
medical reason, given drugs meant to treat serious psychiatric disorders
to people it has shipped out of the United States since 2003 -- the
year the Bush administration handed the job of deportation to the
Department of Homeland Security's new Immigration and Customs Enforcement
agency, known as ICE. Involuntary chemical restraint of detainees,
unless there is a medical justification, is a violation of some international
human rights codes. The practice is banned by several countries where,
confidential documents make clear, U.S. escorts have been unable to
inject deportees with extra doses of drugs during layovers en route
to faraway places. Federal officials have seldom acknowledged publicly
that they sedate people for deportation. The few times officials have
spoken of the practice, they have understated it, portraying sedation
as rare and "an act of last resort." Neither is true, records
and interviews indicate.
The most frequently used drugs in the sedation 'cocktail' are haldol,
an anti-psychotic medication that "gained notoriety in the Soviet
Union, where it was often given to political dissidents imprisoned
in psychiatric hospitals." Ativan, used to control anxiety, and
Cogentin, a medication that supposedly lessens Haldol's side effects
of muscle spasms and rigidity.
The medically recommended dosage for the Haldol alone, from the report:
For aggressive behavior, 0.5 milligrams twice a day
to 5 milligrams three times a day, although doses of up to 10 milligrams
a day may be used in a hospital emergency room.
This graph illustrates the dosage, and number of detainees given
Haldol:
The U.S. made flight layovers during some trips with sedated detainees,
and as there are foreign nations that forbid the practice, the report
also details some run-ins between flight nurses and foreign officials,
which in one instance resulted in a detainee being returned to Atlanta,
GA from a layover in France.
The full report by the Washington Post's Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest
is available online here.
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